A Few Words About Snopes.com

You can’t spend long on-line these days without hearing about Snopes.com, that arbiter of Internet truth; and over the last year I’ve several times read anti-Snopes rants, along these lines: Who are these people? What are their credentials? They have no credentials! They pretend to be experts about subject XYZ, but they’ve got no training in XYZ! And so on, and so forth. Many of them call Snopes’ political leanings into question.

Here’s the deal. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David “snopes” Mikkelson, and has been since its founding in 1995. It’s true that the Mikkelsons aren’t trained in subject XYZ, whatever XYZ is today; but what they are trained in is folklore, and particularly the folklore of urban legends. The pair of them were already tracking urban legends when I first ran into them on the alt.folklore.urban Usenet newsgroup back in the early 1990’s. I say, “ran into”; they were active on the newsgroup (“snopes” was David Mikkelson’s Usenet handle), and I read it once in a while. If they’ve ever run across my name I’d be greatly surprised.

Folklorists like the Mikkelsons collect and catalog legends. They look for variants, and follow the evolution of legends over time, and they keep records. More than that, they rely on interested parties to send them new legends and new variants of old legends. And they put their findings on line at Snopes.com. (Before that, they were the keepers of the alt.folklore.urban “FAQ” list, if I remember correctly.) In short, they are experts at what we now call crowd-sourcing.

More than that: if a story is going around the Internet, and it’s clearly a slightly edited or expanded version of a story that went round two years ago (which was probably a slightly edited or expanded version of a story that went round two years before that), then it almost certainly is false on the face of it…or, at best, has a small kernel of truth far back in its lineage. Many of the scare stories I see floating about are in this category.

So that’s why Snopes.com is valuable. Not because of the vast expertise of Barbara and David Mikkelson, but because of crowd-sourcing, and because the Mikkelsons keep records.

(As to their political leanings, I have no idea. They claim to be apolitical in their work, and I see no reason to doubt them.)